San Francisco calamity by earthquake and fire

Charles Morris

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pubOne.info present you this new edition. Earthquake and famine, fire and sudden death- these are the destroyers that men fear when they come singly; but upon the unhappy people of California they came together, a hideous quartette, to slay human beings, to blot from existence the wealth that represented prolonged and strenuous effort, to bring hunger and speechless misery to three hundred thousand homeless and terror-stricken people.

Informations

• Publié par: Pub One Info
• Date de parution: 06 novembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9782819933083
• Langue: English

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PREFACE
Earthquake and famine, fire and sudden death— theseare the destroyers that men fear when they come singly; but uponthe unhappy people of California they came together, a hideousquartette, to slay human beings, to blot from existence the wealththat represented prolonged and strenuous effort, to bring hungerand speechless misery to three hundred thousand homeless andterror-stricken people.
The full measure of the catastrophe can probablynever be taken. The summary cannot be made amid the panic, theconfusion, the removal of ancient landmarks, the completesubversion of the ordinary machinery of society. When chaos comes,as it did in San Francisco, and all the channels of familiar lifeare closed, and human anguish grows to be intolerable, compilationof statistics is impossible, even if it were not repugnant to thefeelings. And when order is once more restored, after the lapse ofmany weeks, months and perhaps years, the details of the calamityhave merged into one undecipherable mass of misery which defies theanalyst and the historian. It is the purpose of this bookfaithfully to record the story of these awful days when years werelived in a moment and to preserve an accurate chronicle of them,not only for the people whose hearts yearn in sympathy to-day, butfor their posterity.
Other frightful catastrophes the world has known.The earthquake which dropped Lisbon into the sea in 1755, and in amoment swallowed up twenty-five thousand people, was perhaps moreawful than the convulsion which has brought woe to San Francisco.When Krakatoa Mountain, in the Straits of Sunda, in 1883, splitasunder and poured across the land a mighty wave, in whichthirty-six thousand human beings perished, the results also weremore terrible.
The whirlwind of fire which consumed St. Pierre, inthe Island of Martinique, and the devastation wrought by Vesuvius afew days previous to that at San Francisco, need not be used forcomparison with the latter tragedy, but they may be referred to,that we may recall the fact that this land of ours is not the onlyone which has suffered.
But since the western hemisphere was discoveredthere has been in this quarter of the globe no violence of naturalforces at all comparable in destructive fury with that which wasmanifested upon the Pacific coast. The only other calamity at allequalling it, or surpassing it, was the Civil War, and that was thework of the evil passions of man inciting him to slay his brother,while Nature would have had him live in peace.
The earthquake in San Francisco, which crumbledstrong buildings as if they were made of paper, would have beenterrible enough; but afterward came the horror of fire and ofimprisoned men and women burned alive, and now to it was added thesuffering of multitudes from hunger and exposure.
Public attention is fixed on the great city; butsmaller cities had their days and nights of destruction, horror andmisery. Some were almost destroyed. Others were partly ruined, andbeyond their borders, over a wide area, the trembling of the earthtoppled houses, annihilated property and transformed riches intopoverty. The cost in life can be reckoned. The money loss willnever be computed, for the appraised value of the wrecked propertyconveys no notion of the consequences of the almost completeparalysis, for a time, of the commercial operations by means ofwhich men and women earn their bread.
When the weakness and the folly and the sin of menbring woe upon other men, there are plenty of texts for thepreacher and no scarcity of earnest preachers. But here is a vastand awful catastrophe that befell from an act of Nature apparentlyno more extraordinary than the shrinkage of hot metal in theprocess of cooling. The consequences are terrifying in this casebecause they involve the habitations of half a million people; but,no doubt, the process goes on somewhere within the earth almostcontinuously, and it no more involves the theory of malignantNature than that of an angry God.
If we contemplate it, possibly we may be helped to aprofitable estimate of our own relative insignificance. We think,with some notion of our importance, of the thousand million men wholive upon the earth; but they are a mere handful of animate atomsin comparison with the surface, to say nothing of the solidcontents, of the globe itself.
We are fond of boasting in this latter day of man'smarvelous success in subduing the forces of Nature; and, while weare in the midst of exultation over our victories, Nature tumblesthe rocks about somewhere within the bowels of the earth, and wehave to learn the old lesson that our triumphs have not penetratedfarther than to the very outermost rim of the realms of Nature.
A few weak, almost helpless, creatures, we millionsof men stand upon the deck of a great ship, which goes rollingthrough space that is itself incomprehensible, and usually we areso busy with our paltry ambitions, our transgressions, ourrighteous labors, our prides and hopes and entanglements that weforget where we are and what is our destiny. A direct interpositionfrom a Superior Power, even if it be hurtful to the body, might berequired to persuade us to stop and consider and take anew ourbearings, so that we may comprehend in some larger degree ourprecise relations to things. The wisest men have been the mostready to recognize the beneficence of the discipline of affliction.If there were no sorrow, we should be likely to find the school oflife unprofitable.
For one thing, the school wherein sorrow is a partof the discipline is that in which is developed human sympathy, oneof the finest and most ennobling manifestations of the Love whichis, in its essence, divine. In human life there is much that isignoble, and the race has almost contemptible weakness andinsignificance in comparison with the physical forces of theuniverse.
But man is superior to all these forces in hispossession of the power of affection; and in almost the lowest andbasest of the race this power, if latent and half lost, may befound and evoked by the spectacle of the suffering of afellow-creature.
The human family looks on with pity while thehomeless and hungry and impoverished Californians endure pangs.Wherever the news went, by the swift processes of electricity,there men and women, some of them, perhaps, hardly knowing whereCalifornia is, were sorry and willing and eager to help. There arequarrels within the family sometimes, when nation wars with nation,and all love seems to have vanished; but the world is, in truth,akin. “God hath made of one blood all the nations of the earth, ”and the blood “tells” when suffering comes.
THE PUBLISHERS.
THE SAN FRANCISCO CALAMITY BY EARTHQUAKE ANDFIRE
CHAPTER I.
San Francisco and Its Terrific Earthquake.
On the splendid Bay of San Francisco, one of thenoblest harbors on the whole vast range of the Pacific Ocean, longhas stood, like a Queen of the West on its seven hills, thebeautiful city of San Francisco, the youngest and in its own wayone of the most beautiful and attractive of the large cities of theUnited States. Born less than sixty years ago, it has grown withthe healthy rapidity of a young giant, outvieing many cities ofmuch earlier origin, until it has won rank as the eighth city ofthe United States, and as the unquestioned metropolis of our farWestern States.
It is on this great and rich city that the darkdemon of destruction has now descended, as it fell on the nextyounger of our cities, Chicago, in 1872. It was the rage of thefire-fiend that desolated the metropolis of the lakes. Upon theQueen City of the West the twin terrors of earthquake andconflagration have descended at once, careening through itsthronged streets, its marts of trade, and its abodes alike ofpoverty and wealth, and with the red hand of devastation sweepingone of the noblest centres of human industry and enterprise fromthe face of the earth. It is this story of almost irremediable ruinwhich it is our unwelcome duty to chronicle. But before enteringupon this sorrowful task some description of the city that hasfallen a prey to two of the earth's chief agents of destructionmust be given.
San Francisco is built on the end of a peninsula ortongue of land lying between the Pacific Ocean and the broad SanFrancisco Bay, a noble body of inland water extending southward forabout forty miles and with a width varying from six to twelvemiles. Northward this splendid body of water is connected with SanPablo Bay, ten miles long, and the latter with Suisun Bay, eightmiles long, the whole forming a grand range of navigable watersonly surpassed by the great northern inlet of Puget Sound. TheGolden Gate, a channel five miles long, connects this great harborwith the sea, the whole giving San Francisco the greatestcommercial advantages to be found on the Pacific coast.
THE EARLY DAYS OF SAN FRANCISCO. The original siteof the city was a grant made by the King of Spain of four squareleagues of land. Congress afterwards confirmed this grant. It wasan uninviting region, with its two lofty hills and its variouslower ones, a barren expanse of shifting sand dunes extending fromtheir feet. The population in 1830 was about 200 souls, about equalto that of Chicago at the same date. It was not much larger in1848, when California fell into American hands and the discovery ofgold set in train the famous rush of treasure seekers to that farland. When 1849 dawned the town contained about 2, 000 people. Theyhad increased to 20, 000 before the year ended. The place, with itssteep and barren hills and its sandy stretches, was not inviting,but its ease of access to the sea and its sheltered harbor wereimportant features, and people settled there, making it a depot ofmining supplies and a point of departure for the mines.
The place grew rapidly and has continued to grow. Atfirst a city of flimsy frame buildings, it became early a prey tothe flames, fire sweeping through it three times in 1850 and takingtoll of the young